Architecture and Film by Mark Lamster

Author:Mark Lamster
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Princeton Architectural Press
Published: 2012-08-29T00:00:00+00:00

In 1959, Saul Bass ran the title of Alfred Hitchcock’s suspense thriller North by Northwest across the gridded facade of the United Nations Secretariat Building.

OPENING CEREMONIES:

TYPOGRAPHY and the MOVIES,

1955–1969

PETER HALL

IT MIGHT SEEM perverse, to the film critic and student, to decapitate the century’s films of their opening and closing minutes and contemplate the offcuts as a movement. But this ignoble assortment of clips yields a colorful field of study. In a sense, the film title is to the movie as the billboard and neon sign are to architecture. It advertises the film’s wares; reflects, or betrays, the director and studio’s aesthetic aim (or lack thereof); and with the aid of hindsight indicates something of the prevailing state of the film industry. And like the sign, the title sequence is either ignored or disparaged by serious film students for its suspiciously utilitarian motives and close relation to advertising. Their qualms are not entirely unfounded. The stand-alone credit sequence came about as the products of vanity and the unexpected union between filmmakers and commercial artists. But as a form, it is capable of reaching sublime heights. It might be considered the beautiful bastard child of the medium.

The film title came of age in 1955, when director Otto Preminger unveiled his noirish junkie-thriller The Man with the Golden Arm with a striking monochrome graphic sequence designed by Saul Bass. To Elmer Bernstein’s syncopated score and big-band orchestration, a series of white bars appear and shift on the black screen, suggesting drumsticks, then searchlights, before finally transforming into the jagged arm of the film’s title. Bass called it “a sort of abstract ballet—erratic and strident.”1 At the time, this kind of prequel was unprecedented. Credits bearing the names of the movie, director, studio, and stars (not necessarily in that order) were usually rendered by lettering artists and held up unceremoniously in front of the camera at the beginning and end of the feature. But in The Man with the Golden Arm and, to a lesser extent, Carmen Jones a year earlier, Preminger and Bass turned this static procedure into an animated event. According to Bass, “there was a time when titles were very interesting, going back to the early 1930s or even the late 1920s. Then it bogged down and became bad lettering produced by firms that ground out titles. What I did was reinvent the whole notion of using a title to create a little atmosphere.”2

The motive was undoubtedly commercial. The stark power and reductive formalism of The Man with the Golden Arm sequence was actually derived from Bass’s previously designed poster for the film, which encapsulated in a simple “ideogram” the story of an addicted jazz drummer (played by Frank Sinatra) caught in a triangle of dependency. Rather than illustrating the ingredients of the story—a drum set, urban scene, and distraught faces of the stars would have been acceptable—Bass devised a logo with an arm thrust downward into a prison of black rectangles. It was a seminal example of his ability to

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